Evil Extensions

You might already know this, but it’s so important that it’s worth mentioning first. The browser extensions that you have installed can significantly impact your browsing speed. The first thing you should do is go through your list of installed extensions and delete any that you’re not using. That could make a big difference immediately. Once you’ve done that, if you’re still having speed issues, you can look a little more closely at which extensions are using resources.

On Chrome, all you need to do is go to Menu > More Tools > Task Manager, and you’ll see a window that details how much memory each tab and each extension is using. If there’s an extension or two that seem to be using a lot of memory, you’ll need to decide if they’re worth keeping around. In Firefox, you can install the about:add-onsmemory extension to get the same information. In Safari and Internet Explorer, there’s no way to monitor this, so you’ll have to disable extensions one at a time and see if a specific one is slowing you down.

Annoying Antivirus Software

Inefficient antivirus software will slow down your entire computer, but you might notice it the most when you’re using your browser. Independent testers have done a lot of testing of antivirus packages, and one of the things they usually test is the amount of system resources that they use. Both AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives have done extensive testing, and they’ve revealed a huge discrepancy in how much memory your antivirus could be using.

For example, AV-TEST used a data-copying task in which OS X was used to copy 26.6 GB of data. With no antivirus software running, it took 66.1 seconds. With Bitdefender running, it took 66.8 seconds. Avast, 72.7 seconds. Sophos, 87.7 seconds. AV-Comparatives’ test on Windows showed that Avast, Kaspersky, and McAfee were very fast, while Avira and Sophos were less so.

Check out the results of these tests to see if your antivirus could be slowing down your computer, and if it is, consider going with a different provider. Because there are so many good free antivirus solutions, it should be easy to find another one (if you’re willing to pay for one, even better).

The best way to deal with this issue is to turn on click-to-play for all plugins. In a nutshell, this stops plugins from running automatically—they’ll need to get permission from you before they start up. This way, you can prevent them from using system resources when the plugins aren’t needed.

Diabolical DNS

A DNS (Dynamic Name Server) is like a phone book for the Internet—it tells your computer where to look to find the URL that you’ve entered in your address bar. You might not think that this could make a difference in how fast your browser works, but it can have a surprisingly significant effect. Choosing the best DNS for your location could speed up your connection significantly.

Boundless Browsing Data

Did you know that your browser stores a massive amount of data about where you’ve been and what you’ve looked at? In addition to this being a privacy concern, it could also potentially slow down your browsing. Fortunately, this is an easy one to take care of: go to your History menu or your browser settings, and find the “delete browsing history” button. Get rid of your browsing historyHow To Manually & Automatically Clear Your Browser HistoryHow To Manually & Automatically Clear Your Browser HistoryAs you browse the Internet, tracks of websites you visit are left on your computer, including cookies, cached websites, a history of visited sites and searches, site preferences, and more. These data reveal your browsing...Read More, cookies, download logs, and anything else that you don’t need. While it might not make a huge difference, it could contribute to a faster browsing experience.

Get Up to Speed

After addressing these five issues, your browsing should be quite a bit faster. If it’s not, you might have deeper-seated issues that should be addressed by a tech (or a new computer).

How do you make sure that your browser stays fast? What strategies have you found to be effective? Share your best advice below!

Question, I have Firefox's anti tracking turned on, plus ublock and disconnect. I find to whitelist sites like Makeuseof and see ads, I have to whitelist all three. Do people need to have an ad blocker with Firefox's anti tracking turned on? This is built into Firefox, not the Do not track option in preferences.

If you're talking about the Do Not Track option in Firefox, you're probably going to want to use something above and beyond that. Do Not Track just requests that sites don't track you; it doesn't actually prevent them from doing so. So if you're concerned about ads or tracking, you'll need more than the built-in stuff in Firefox. But if you're using uBlock and Disconnect, you probably don't need Do Not Track, as they'll do most of the hard work. So you could just whitelist twice instead of three times.

These are all great tips! Improving the speed of your computer will definitely increase the speed of your browsing. I've noticed that turning off visual effects can make a pretty big difference in some cases; that can use a lot of graphical power. And services that run in the background, especially if they're connecting to the internet, can be a big drain.

chrome anti-phishing can be unchecked, if you got a lightweight antivirus, it takes out a lot of load
lot of people use adblocker, i find it very memory consuming but pretty important, its a good solution to use admuncher, now is free and with filters can do a lot like adblocker, and not using browsers ram

switching to beta
sometimes is much better, but usally better, and stable enough

flags-this is experimental, some nice and some useless features turn on and off

habits: open new tab at start and close the first, loads up useless things anyway

ram disk: this is a bit more pro tip, harder to make, use a ram disk manager program like DAYU (free on many giveaway sites), then make a ram disk of 1 gb or at least 512 mb, move chrome cache there

Mozilla recent fixed a (years-old!) issue in Firefox that caused AdBlock Plus to use huge amounts of memory. ABP is now at least as fast as uBlock/uBlock Origin, meaning there's no significant speed or memory penalty for having it installed. ABP's filter creator, UI, and Element Hiding Helper integation is also much better than uBlock.

Interesting—I didn't know that. Do you happen to know exactly what "no significant speed or memory penalty" translates as? I would imagine that no matter how efficient your adblocker is, you'll need to dedicate a decent chunk of resources to deal with all of the monitoring it needs to do.

I would suppose this is the same bug that gave uBlock/uBlock Origin its speed vs. the original AdBlock. I've since switched back to Adblock Plus since uBlock's UI was so horrible (making it nearly impossible to add new rules).

Dann Albright

January 2, 2016 at 1:58 am

Interesting; the first article says that it's an increase of performance of about 10%, which certainly isn't insignificant. I would imagine that whether or not that makes a big difference in your day-to-day browsing depends on your computer and whether you're already having speed issues. Thanks for sharing these links!

Miles Cannon

October 27, 2015 at 8:10 am

With FF (as well with other browsers), search on speeding up FF
I continue to use FF simply because of the number of easy hacks once how is understood with what "about:blahblah" hack can do

I am hoping M$ still forming Edge browser will really step up the game when it is released / unleashed into the wild

Yes, once you get the point where you're comfortable messing around with things like that (and flags in Chrome), you can make a lot of tweaks that will increase your performance. That's a great thing to do if you're still having speed issues after trying the things listed above.

"Boundless Browsing Data"
In Firefox, instead of constantly remembering to delete your browsing data, you can go to Preferences>Privacy and under History use the "Never remember history" option. This will delete your browsing history automatically.

That's true, that is definitely an option. If you're having serious speed problems, that could be a good way to go—I feel like if it's not a dire situation, though, you're losing some valuable functionality that way, like autocomplete for sites that you've visited before and staying logged into password-protected places.

Dann is a freelance journalist interested in technology, health, and cognitive science. When he's not writing, he's almost certainly playing board or card games (or working on a forthcoming book about them). Follow him on Twitter at @dann_albright.